Description

The Pacific Northwest Chapter has partnered with the Wenatchee Valley chapter of the Native Plant Society to bring you a hybrid Red Barn event.

Red Barn Event - Cottonwoods: Unlocking our Rivers' Histories
Thursday, February 27, 2025, 7:00 pm-8:00 pm

Doors open at 6:30 pm for a community social with beer and wine available for purchase.

The streaming event will start at 7:00pm.
Streaming link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAYduajgr7M

Join us for a presentation on Cottonwood (Populus species) which are common across North American floodplains and riparian ecosystems, including those of the Columbia River Basin and the watersheds of the North Central Cascades. Across the West, there are several species of cottonwood, all of which are riparian specialists that rely on the flowing water that rivers and streams provide to disperse their seeds, facilitate growth, and complete their life cycle. Cottonwood are often a dominant tree species in arid and semi-arid floodplains and build wildlife habitat through forest stands and shape fish habitat through their large wood that influences rivers and their floodplains. Here we’ll discuss how cottonwood evolved to be true river specialists, and what their presence, absence, and regeneration can tell us about a river’s history and diversity: its flow regime and the evolution of its channels across the watershed. Join us for a virtual fieldtrip through the rivers of North Central Washington as we unlock the natural history of rivers, as told by their floodplain cottonwood forests.

Nate Hough-Snee is a Leavenworth, Washington-based wetland and riparian ecologist who researches and restores aquatic ecosystems across the Pacific Northwest. He has a Ph.D. in Ecology from Utah State University's Watershed Sciences Department. An environmental storyteller at heart, Nate currently spins environmental narratives of the Wenatchee and Entiat watersheds, Lake Chelan, and Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Nate currently works with the Lake Chelan Research Institute as a senior scientist and conducts environmental research and policy work through his firm, Meadow Run Environmental. Recently Nate has focused his attention on environmental flows for rivers and streams, and how they affect various forest habitats. As a past president of the Society of Wetland Scientists’ Pacific Northwest Chapter, most of Nate's ecosystem stories are told about rivers, plants, and people and with enough humor to have a good time.

Photo credit Nate Hough-Snee